English Apples

Conversation with boy (apparently white, native) at the Liverpool Street Station greengrocers' stall on Tuesday:

I to boy: "Have you any English apples?"

Boy to me: "English apples? There's no such thing."

I to boy (puzzled): "No, I mean have you any ENGLISH apples?"

Boy to me: "There's various kinds of apples: Golden delicious, Braeburn, [something]-Reds. We don't have 'english apples'".

I to boy, in some desperation: "No I don't want any of those, I wanted some English ones."

Boy (puzzled) to man who runs stall: "What are English apples?"

Man to boy: "Means coxes. There's none left."

I to boy and man: "Oh". Walks away, wondering whether he means that England has run out of coxes, or that the stall had temporarily sold out for the day.

This stall was about an hour's distance from Kent, which was once an orchard as I recall, the "garden of England". The Golden Delicious were probably from France. The Braeburns probably six months old and from New Zealand. The Granny Smiths probably six months old and from S. Africa.

But this conversation is so sad, in so many ways, that you wonder whether there's any hope left. There was, in fact, no British produce on the stall at all, as far as I could see.

Milk

This is what our doorstep looks like in the morning.







In Norwich one day a week my doorstep looks like this.









Five minutes after fetching the milk in from the doorstep this is what my glass of milk on the breakfast table looks like.






From the cow to my breakfast, maybe 24 hours? Now that's what I call cold fresh milk. (I suppose it would be even better if I could go and fetch it warm from the cow).

I was thinking of taking a photo of one of my neighbour's doorsteps, with the blue recycling box piled high with plastic milk bottles: bottles which have doubtless been fetched from the supermarket by car, and will now be carried empty to some distribution place and sent back to China or somewhere for turning into more plastic things we don't want, before being shipped back here again.

Now this seems to me to be just mad. We could all have our milk delivered daily in clean glass bottles, clean milk with no contamination from the chemicals they use in plastics which leech into the contents of the containers. Of course the known ones of these (phthalates, which have been shown to cause hormone disruption, and are implicated in breast cancer etc) are now controlled and not permitted in most food packaging, but do you know what else they're putting in the plastic? When did you last think about how milk from plastic bottles always tastes of plastic? I guess people get used to it, and cease to find it disgusting.

But it seems to me highly likely that these kinds of pollution may have quite a lot to do with the increasing incidence of intolerance to milk. And asthma, and eczema. Why is it that so many children today can't drink milk? When I was young every child drank a third of a pint of milk every day at break time, from a glass bottle with a paper straw (no phthalates, no plastic chemicals) and they were healthy and happy.

No one had a milk intolerance. Is that a co-incidence?